Arthur F. Winnington Ingram

“ And, first of all, have we got such a perpetual spring of sympathy in our hearts ready for emergencies, ready for every sufferer, ready for every sinner who comes to us? Have we such a perpetual spring within us, ready and accessible for use in our home lives? It seems that the one thing a Christian should never be without is this spring of sympathy. "The water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up to everlasting life." It is hard to see what good a Christian is doing in the world at all if this primary function of his Christianity is undischarged. ”

“ Mere kindness, apart from sincerity, apart from moral courage, without the rainbow of purity, counts low among the virtues. We have known kind people, have we not, who were weak, who were fickle, who were even treacherous, and there is a sad truth in that half-cynical statement that it is the province of the wise to remedy the mistakes of the good. But what captivated the whole Empire in the sympathy of Queen Victoria was its strength; that one so strong should be so kind; that one so fearless should have so much sympathy ”

“ There is some sympathy which enervates instead of strengthening. It thinks of itself, it thinks of the happiness of having to itself the object of its sympathy, it seeks merely to soothe. But the true sympathy goes far beyond that; the true sympathy never thinks of itself at all. It is simply concentrated upon one thought—how can I, in this trial-time, when my brother or my sister is stricken down by my side, how can I nerve and strengthen him or her to rise to the glorious vocation to which God has called him or called her, to strengthen them to be what God would have them be? ”

“ What is the Incarnation but the taking of a human body, with all its passions, with all its impulses, a real Human body, and wearing it perfectly untarnished to the end? We must take hold, by meditation and by prayer, of the teaching of the Incarnation, that we may live as children of the Incarnation. We were sent into the world with a rainbow round our souls. ”

“ How then are we to gain the secret? What is the secret of moral courage? And, in answering that question, let us be perfectly fair to those who, like the Stoics of old, showed a wonderful endurance with no knowledge whatever of Christ, and very little belief in another world; let us be perfectly honest and frank with regard to the virtue of those in our day who, having lost, to their infinite misfortune, their childish faith, still say to themselves: "I will cling to my morality, I will try and keep a clean hand and a pure heart" ”

“ And yet can we deny—would God we could!—that in Christian work there is an amount of self-advertisement, of jealousy among workers, and of insincerity which lowers our cause, and damages the progress of Christianity? Think for a moment what it would be if all Christians were really united as Christ meant them to be, if they worked with one another, showing a common front to the world, one great society, as Christ conceived it, without jealousy, without conceit, without pride, but throwing themselves into one magnificent common cause. ”

“ And, if anyone of you has ever been through that terrible trial of suffering under an imputation on your honour, which you know to be false, but cannot prove to be false, you realize what a field such a state as that presents for moral courage. What are we to say to anyone we see who is under that most terrible trial? What are we to say to ourselves if such a misfortune and trial comes to us? ”

“ The man or woman was not born who dared to take a liberty in the presence of Queen Victoria. And can we wonder that the awful purity which shone round the throne chased away, as evil birds are chased away by the light, all things bad, all things loathsome, and all things even questionable! ”

“ We saw that moral courage is only strong enough to stand up against overwhelming trouble, when anxieties and difficulties are thick around us, if we really believe that our Lord Jesus Christ is with us in the ship, and that we hear His voice say to us, "Why are ye so fearful, O ye of little faith?"
And yet, as we go on, we become more and more aware that we have not yet penetrated to the central secret of her power; nor shall we. Can any man name the real secret of influence, or analyse the strength of personality? ”

“ Those who look out upon scenes which disgrace our social system, and our city, and, with a shrug of the shoulders, lead people to believe they constitute a necessary evil which cannot be faced, are not only unconsciously believing in the blasphemy that God made His physical laws so that they could not obey His moral laws; they are not only condoning the most unblushing cruelty which is going on in our midst to-day, but, also, they are not realizing that Jesus Christ came with the very purpose among others of proving that the pure life was a possible one. ”

“ Those who pass from us, pass, we believe, into what has been called, "God's great Convalescent Home" in another world, but to us who have to suffer, who receive these strokes, the suffering is not useless; it is a furnace which has to fashion that heavenly tempered thing which we call "moral courage," and to produce it any suffering is worth bearing. Do think over that, you who may be going through the furnace now, do remember that you have not lost that lad, that child, for ever, that it is only a few years until you see him again ”

“ When we have, even within the last few months, terrible instances of breach of trust among those who have been entrusted with the most sacred interests by the widow and the orphan, must we not acknowledge that a second great monument which we might build to our Queen would be to restore to the trade and commerce of the country those principles of honour and integrity on which the great firms were built up, and to make it true again from end to end of the world that an Englishman's word is as good as his bond. ”

“ Is it not an extraordinary thing that when we are only here for a few fleeting years, and everybody around us is hurrying to his grave as fast as he can, and when the only person whose opinion matters the least is the eternal God, Who goes on generation after generation, and before Whom everyone must appear at the last—is it not an extraordinary thing how little we think of Him at all? ”

“ And so, again—would to God we had not to add it!—what a revolution would be worked in Christian work itself—Christian work that is supposed to demand from everyone who undertakes it perfect forgetfulness of self, and entire self-abnegation, to have as its workers men and women conspicuous for humility, for thinking of others before themselves, for being ready to bear the cross on the way to the crown. ”

“ It is one thing to say words which, understood in a certain sense, are true, it is one thing to avoid direct breaches in our action of the law of honour, but it is another thing to be in ourselves absolutely sincere, to look up into the eyes of God, as a truthful child looks up into the eyes of its mother, to possess our own hearts like a flawless gem, with nothing to hide, nothing to keep back, and nothing to be ashamed of—that is to have truth in the inward parts, and that is what God demands. ”

“ And the picture is so comforting, because it tells us that that craving for sympathy, which all of us feel at times, is a true human instinct, that there is nothing wrong in it, that one of the things that we can do for one another is to be like comrades on a night march, when one or another is stricken down, to stand over him, and be ready, at any moment, with the cup of sympathy to give him. And when Jesus goes to His own disciples to ask them for sympathy, it is a lesson that the need for sympathy is a true need, and the desire for it a true instinct of the human heart. ”

“ Speaking in the very centre of a city reared upon a basis of honourable commerce, it would be more than wicked to refuse to acknowledge the splendid honour and trust on which such commerce is based; but when we clergy, not once or twice, but constantly, get letters from those employed in firms and in business up and down the country, saying, "How can I live a Christian life, when I am obliged by my employer to do dishonest things in business, when I am told to tell lies, or I shall lose my place?" ”

“ There may be some here who know that that is their temptation, who know that they are not true, that they are never themselves, they are always somebody else, or the reflection of the mind of somebody else. Let the example of our truthful Queen speak like a trumpet note the old words of the New Testament, "Stand upright on thy feet," and be a man.
And, if the first secret is detachment of mind, putting aside self-consciousness, which is very often other-people-consciousness, the second secret is an increasing consciousness of God. ”

“ Because it robs them of the joy of the rainbow, because that subtle suggestion, that careless talk, that stumbling block placed in the way, dims the children's view of Heaven, "where their angels do always behold the face of our Father Which is in Heaven." ”

“ And the first thing, therefore, that strikes us is that, in the midst of this personal sorrow, one stroke following after another, with a moral courage which is an example to us all, she never gave up her work; without fainting or failing, that huge pile of documents, which, in a few days of cessation from her work, mounted up—a great statesman tells us—so high, was dealt with, those ceaseless interviews, that constant correspondence—were carried through up to the last by one who proved herself faithful unto death. ”

“ I pray you, then, my friends, safeguard the rainbow for your children, as well as for yourselves. Many careful writers, among others the Head Master of Haileybury, recommend, as a great safeguard, the teaching to children, before knowledge is conveyed to them from impure sources, the simple facts of life. "They are innocent," says the latter writer, "of impurity, indescribably eager for wholesome knowledge, perfectly trustful of their parents, and, though self-absorbed, are capable of being easily trained to a tone of mind to which sympathy is congenial and cruelty abhorrent. ”

“ We saw last Sunday that we were like men who had just watched a great sunset, that we were standing, as it were, in the beautiful and tender after-glow, which so often follows a beautiful sunset, and we set ourselves to try and gather up and meditate upon some of the great qualities in the character of her whom we have lost, as some explanation, of the influence which made her reign so great. ”

“ Therefore, among the virtues which we set ourselves to acquire during Lent, let us set ourselves, with the help of God, and by the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, to see if we cannot acquire in our characters, as part of them, this power of sympathy; and, as we test ourselves, one by one, by the laws which ought to govern our lives during these six weeks, let us test ourselves by that law which more than any other goes to the root of our characters—the law of kindness.
We ought to obey this law, first, in our own home lives ”

“ Have I at the disposal of the brother who needs me the sympathy he wants, and if not, of what use am I in the world? Think what some lives are in the home circle; all the other members of the family have to devote themselves to keeping some one in a good humour. The children are anxious lest the father or perhaps the mother should be ill-tempered to-day. This so-called Christian, with the primary duty of being loving, sympathetic, considerate, is a creature of moods; father is ill-tempered to-day, and the whole house is miserable ”

“ But, then, remember, the sympathy He looks for is the sympathy which He always gave, something as tender and gentle as the touch of a good surgeon's hand upon a wounded limb, but also something as strong, and as firm, and as helpful. Why sympathy gets discredited, why people speak of "a morbid craving for sympathy," is because so much sympathy is sympathy of the wrong sort. ”

“ O ye of little faith," because, unseen by the world, he sees Someone standing with His hand upon the tiller, Someone Whom he believes to have supreme power in the last resort over the waves, and Who he knows, at exactly the right moment when it is best for him, will say the word before which every billow and every storm sinks to rest, "Peace be still." ”

“ It is just that power of being able to take our own line against others; it is just that courage of our opinions; it is consistent with being perfectly humble, and ever ready to learn; it implies no conceit, and no contempt of others, but it enables this one in the workshop to stand up for the faith in which he believes, that one in the drawing-room to take a strong moral line when people are sneering at virtue ”

“ Is there any picture in the whole of the New Testament more touching than that which shows us how He goes just before His greatest trial to seek sympathy from His followers, how He, the Head, the Leader, does not disdain to turn to the very followers who trusted in Him for sympathy? ”

“ In exactly the same way have we for years been watching with loving interest the declining years of our Queen, years that declined so slowly towards the horizon that we almost persuaded ourselves we should have her with us for ever. ”

“ But can we as Christian citizens be content with the arm of the law? Is there no other arm, no other law that we are bound to try before these young lads grow up indeed ruffians who must be dealt with by the law? Are we so hopeless and helpless as to have no other power to bring in upon them? ”